Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Meet the Bitnami Team: James Westby

The Bitnami team is a diverse group of talented people distributed all over the world. Get to know them better through this series of blog posts.

James Westby is a Senior Engineer working remotely from Bristol, UK.

James and his wife enjoying a vacation in Iceland

A brief bio

I am always keen to learn new things and I’ve been lucky that my career so far has allowed me to work in different areas of software. Most of my time was spent at Canonical where I started working on Ubuntu itself, dealing more different languages and build systems than I can remember, and on the Bazaar version control system where I was able to learn Python in more depth. Over the next few years I spent time working with Linaro, and then on web service development and deployment, with a couple of spells as a team lead. After Canonical I spent a short time at an ill-fated Docker startup.

Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?

I joined Bitnami as I am excited by the opportunities that Bitnami has. The technology, partnerships and leadership are almost unrivalled, and that presents a great opportunity for my work to have greater impact. The range of work that Bitnami does also provides a great learning opportunity to me. Since joining I’ve already learned Ruby, nodejs, Go and Kubernetes, and that’s just the beginning. Lastly the capacity for change within the company is huge, it’s always improving in many different ways. This was particularly important to me as when I joined there were few remote employees, but the company has put the time and effort into improving the experience for us. There’s still of course many places we can improve, but every new person that joins brings fresh ideas, and the company is willing to adapt to incorporate them.

What are you working on?

Currently I am working on improving the automation of how we build our containers and cloud images. We need to be able to add more applications to our catalog and produce more types of images for each with sub-linear growth in the manual work that is involved. We are always working on this in some manner, but currently we have a team working on a big change in this area. For me it involves working on many different areas, involving scripts and build systems, web services, docker containers, automated testing and documentation and training.

What do you like to do for fun?

I’m currently spending a lot of time running and cycling as I’m trying to improve my fitness and my 5k and 10k personal bests. Otherwise I really enjoy food, beer, gaming and travel. My wife and I recently travelled to Iceland, which had amazing sights, as well as some great food and beer.

Interested in working with Bitnami and James? Apply for one of our open positions!